By Trevor Hunnicutt and Liz Lee
BEIJING, May 15 (Reuters) – U.S. President Donald Trump and China’s Xi Jinping are set to meet on Friday to wrap up a two-day state visit that has featured pomp and business deals but also a warning from Xi that mishandling the Taiwan issue could send relations spiraling.
Trump is on the first visit by a U.S. president to China, America’s main strategic and economic rival, since his last in 2017, and has been seeking tangible results that might improve his dented approval ratings ahead of crucial midterm elections.
The two leaders are scheduled to have tea and lunch before Trump flies back to the United States.
“Hopefully our relationship with China will be stronger and better than ever before!” Trump wrote in a post on his Truth Social platform early on Friday.
The summit has been aimed at maintaining a fragile trade truce struck when the leaders last met in October and Trump suspended triple-digit tariffs on Chinese goods and Xi backed away from choking global supplies of vital rare earths.
Xi told Trump on Thursday that negotiations on trade issues had reached “balanced and positive outcomes”, without elaborating.
U.S. Trade Representative Jamieson Greer told Bloomberg TV on Friday that it was undecided whether the truce will be extended after it expires later this year but added deals had been firmed up on Chinese purchases of farm goods, beef and Boeing aircraft.
Greer confirmed progress was also made on establishing mechanisms to manage future bilateral trade, with both sides expected to identify $30 billion of non-sensitive goods. The Taiwan issue should not push that off the rails, he added.
Trump told Fox News Channel’s Sean Hannity that China had agreed to order 200 Boeing jets, its first purchase of U.S.-made commercial jets in nearly a decade.
That total was much lower than the 500 or more airplanes markets had expected and Boeing shares fell more than 4% after the comments were aired.
Trump has also been expected to urge China to convince Iran to make a deal with Washington to end a war unpopular with American voters.
But he has traveled to Beijing with a weakened hand after U.S. courts limited his ability to levy tariffs at will and as price increases driven by the Iran war have made him politically vulnerable at home.
A brief U.S. summary of Thursday’s talks highlighted what the White House called the leaders’ shared desire to reopen the Strait of Hormuz waterway off Iran, through which a fifth of global supplies of oil and liquefied natural gas travel in normal times, and Xi’s apparent interest in buying American oil to reduce China’s dependence on Middle East supplies.
“The Chinese are being very pragmatic. They don’t want to be on the wrong side of this. They want to see peace,” Greer told Bloomberg. “So we have a lot of confidence that they will do what they can to limit any kind of material support for Iran.”
STARK WARNING
Xi’s remarks on Taiwan, the democratically governed island Beijing claims, represented a sharp, if not unprecedented, warning during a pomp-filled summit that otherwise appeared friendly and relaxed.
China’s foreign ministry said they came in a closed-door meeting that ran more than two hours.
Taiwan, which lies just 50 miles (80 km) off China’s coast, has long been a flashpoint in U.S.-China ties, with Beijing refusing to rule out the use of military force to gain control of the island and the United States bound by law to provide Taipei with the means to defend itself.
U.S. Secretary of State Marco Rubio, who is with Trump in China, told NBC News that Taiwan was discussed, saying the Chinese “always raise it … we always make clear our position and we move on to the other topics.”
“U.S. policy on the issue of Taiwan is unchanged as of today,” Rubio added.
Trump did not respond to a reporter’s shouted question on whether the leaders had discussed Taiwan when he posed with Xi for photos at the Temple of Heaven UNESCO World Heritage site.
At a lavish state banquet on Thursday, Xi called the China-U.S. relationship the most important in the world and added: “We must make it work and never mess it up.”
JAILED CHINA CRITIC JIMMY LAI
When asked about Hong Kong’s most vocal China critic, media tycoon Jimmy Lai, who was sentenced to 20 years in jail in February on two counts of conspiracy to collude with foreign forces and one count of publishing seditious materials, Rubio said Trump had raised the case with Xi.
“The president always raises that case and a couple others, and obviously we’ll hope to get a positive response from that,” Rubio told NBC News.
“We’d be open to any arrangement that would work for them, as long as he’s given his freedom,” he said of Lai, who had denied all charges against him.
A Chinese foreign ministry spokesperson, when asked about Lai, has previously said that Hong Kong affairs were an internal matter for China.
(Reporting by Trevor Hunnicutt, Liz Lee, Antoni Slodkowski and Mei Mei Chu in Beijing; Ben Blanchard in Taipei; Writing by David Brunnstrom and John Geddie; Editing by Don Durfee, Alistair Bell and Lincoln Feast)
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